Explorations into modernity, colonialism and genocide : revisiting the past in the present

Abstract:

This essay contextualises forms of mass violence and
genocide in a historical perspective since the era of
enlightenment. Western modernity and its notion of
civilisation domesticated and colonised at home and
abroad. The concept of development imposed during the
colonial era elsewhere too included organised violence
as an integral part of the expansion into the rest of the
world. Since then violence remains an element of the
project of globalisation. It has also infected those in
the former so-called periphery executing control over
people. Forms of domination anchored in a colonial
mindset are not any longer only of Eurocentric or
European brand but alive in certain forms of power
executed elsewhere too. Hence there remains a global
responsibility to decolonise the mind.